All posts tagged "walking"

Ben Schrader of the Te Ara encyclopedia blog was inspired in very much the same way as me and wrote a great post yesterday in praise of jaywalking. I encourage you to read not just Ben's post, but the linked Te Ara "street life" section.

Next time you're on Willis St or Lambton Quay during the day, look around. Aren't there a lot more pedestrians on any given length of the street than people in vehicles? How come the foot traffic has to be all squished up and the cars and buses get all the room? Seems like misallocation of resources to me.

Wellington City Council is looking for submissions on their 2040 vision, and in particular their Digital Strategy. They recognise that Wellington is already home to a thriving creative and inventive community, and they want to keep it that way and make it even more so. I think we all know that creativity is greatly helped by chance meetings and random strolls. Thus a city full of creative people is a city full of preoccupied pedestrians, literally bumping into each other. So I argue that making the street safer for inattentive people on foot is actually going to contribute to the Digital Strategy. Really.

This image from the National Library of New Zealand shows us what a major street in a major New Zealand city looked like a century ago. Notice that trams, horses, cyclists and pedestrians are happily occupying the same street. In particular, notice the group in the middle ground, in front of the tram, just standing and doing business. In the street.

You can find old photos from this period from any city in the world and see the same thing. The street is a shared space that belongs to everyone, including people who just want to hang out in the middle of it.

... the person who has the first right to the road is the pedestrian, after him comes the equestrian, then the drivers of horsed vehicles, then the cyclist, and lastly the motorist. The right of the pedestrian and equestrian and the driver of a horsed vehicle are as old as the common law of England, the bicycle and the motor are innovations; they are unknown to the common law, and, other things being equal, their rights must be subordinated to the earlier rights.

A century ago, the street was a place where the pedestrian enjoyed the highest privileges, up to and including standing around in the middle of it without actually going anywhere.

Of course, now, if you get run down in the street, apparently it's your own damn fault. You're taking risks. You should be taking heed.

The presumption of the Dominion Post journalists, and to be fair, no doubt of a lot of their readers, is that roads are the preserve of the motorist. The motorist has the right to the road, and not much responsibility to you if you are not yourself already in a motor vehicle. If Wellington has a problem with people being struck down on the roads, those people should have been paying attention, instead of stepping in front of the motor vehicles.

I look at this completely differently. Wellington has a compact street layout. The CBD is dense with attractive destinations. The weather is often dodgy and tempts a person to get where they're going fast. The streets are filled with diverting prospects. It is absolutely to the credit of Wellington that it affords too many things that are interesting to the average human to leave them enough spare brain power to watch for cars.

Our technology has outpaced our brains. Human brains are attuned for leopards, mammoths and wolves in a natural environment, not for big heavy fast metal objects in a constructed environment. What if instead of trying to change our brains, we changed our technology and built environment?

A few of my younger colleagues at work callously commented on the supposed stupidity of the poor woman who was most recently run down. I asked them if they had never stepped out without looking, or chanced it when they shouldn't have, and if they too were too stupid to live. Answer came there none.

The problem here is not inattentive pedestrians. We are what we are. The problem is that we have a very dangerous mode of transport cutting through an area where people want to walk. I want to take it as given that we should prioritise the power of ordinary people to walk where they want to walk. Then the correct solution is to either reduce the danger, through lowered speeds, or to move the dangerous vehicles from the centre of the CBD to the periphery, or into another plane, above or below street level. Lower the speed limit to 20kph -- for cyclists too -- ban all vehicles except bikes and delivery vans, and route the buses around the periphery, or into tunnels, or overpasses.

This may strike you as absurd. But the situation we have now, the assumptions presented as natural in the Dom Post today, are equally absurd. Far from being natural, they are the product of a century of lobbying from car manufacturers and the rich, privileged class who comprised the bulk of early motorists, as I read in Slate a while ago:

The very word jaywalk is an interesting—and not historically neutral—one. Originally an insult against bumptious "jays" from the country who ineptly gamboled on city sidewalks, it was taken up by a coalition of pro-automobile interests in the 1920s, notes historian Peter D. Norton in his book Fighting Traffic. "Before the American city could be physically reconstructed to accommodate automobiles, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where cars belong," he writes. "Until then, streets were regarded as public spaces, where practices that endangered or obstructed others (including pedestrians) were disreputable. Motorists' claim to street space was therefore fragile, subject to restrictions that threatened to negate the advantages of car ownership." And so, where newspapers like the New York Times once condemned the "slaughter of pedestrians" by cars and defended the right to midblock crossings—and where cities like Cincinnati weighed imposing speed "governors" for cars—after a few decades, the focus of attention had shifted from marauding motorists onto the reckless "jaywalker."

Thus the motoring class, in a sort of vehicular enclosure, privatised the commons of the road for themselves. Even today, privately funded lobby groups like the seemingly benign Automobile Association strive to ensure that the private car owns the road.

Perhaps we can't return to the days when newspapers fulminated at motorists who went over 10 miles an hour. But I'd like us to re-evaluate, from first principles, what kind of inner city we want to have, and whether motor traffic deserves the assumption of right and protection from blame that it currently gets. Blaming the victims of a natural behaviour in an unnatural setting is not going to improve matters a bit.